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The Kiss Precise

More on Descartes and his Circle Theorem

And on Frederick Soddy and his poetry

Explore the Kissing Circles Collection

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb,
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line,
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

 
 

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

Frederick Soddy (1936)

 

 

The Complex Kiss Precise

Yet more is true: if all four discs
Are sited in the complex plane,
Then centers over radii
Obey the self-same rule again.

Wilks, Mallows and Laguna (2001)

 

 

Drag the centers to rearrange the circles- or use the table below to control location and curvature/radius.
Try some Apollonian Gaskets of your own - and try the Quiz!

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BendRadiusCenter(x)Center(y)

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